


The Shape of a Coward

by EnchantedToReadYou



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Abuse, Child Abuse, Drugs, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Minor Character Death, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 02:11:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9152962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnchantedToReadYou/pseuds/EnchantedToReadYou
Summary: Neil couldn't run any longer. Even with death on their trail, he needed to stay, he needed to be there to see Kevin Day play Exy. Just long enough to watch him succeed in Neil's dream, just one season. He had feared Kevin would spot him in the bleachers, not to run into him at his job at Sweeties. Hadn't expected ever to step into Exy uniform ever again, even less to pass all the tests Andrew Minyard throws his way. If his mother knew, she'd break Neil's legs and take him to another continent. For now, she stayed because he did. For now, she didn't know he planned to stay Neil.





	

**Author's Note:**

> AU in which Mary Hatford stayed alive and the both of them stay in Columbia. 
> 
> TW: You will see a lot of her abuse of him and a lot of justification by the narrator for it. All the other trigger warnings of the series apply too.
> 
> I am also notorious for never ending stories as a fair warning, so here's to trying anyway.

She punctuated words with punches. That was what she did. He no longer apologized, but let her anger try to get through his skin and bone and maybe, possibly, make him understand. This is what he did.

Her fists bruised and broke, but it were her words that would always try and bend him into permanent shape. He would have let them again, but he was Neil now. He was here, now. How could he be someone else again after being Neil? After knowing what life was like when adrenaline shot into your veins out of excitement instead of fear? She was trying to get him to stop being Neil but she couldn’t.

His mother was sleeping in front of the door that night, knife in one hand, gun next to where the other had dropped open. She had yelled at him hours before, but that had only come after the beating. His right ear still rang where the flats of her palm had drummed the sound of pain into it it. It echoed loudly through his battered body.

Neil draped the softest blanket over his mother and hoped that she would one day forgive his selfishness.

He had Exy now, had friends, had Sweeties. Andrew had started kissing him and he had started kissing back, they were kissing, and how could he not be Neil? How could he go back to being another person, in another city now? How could he ever be bend into another shape but Neil? He knew that his actions were in turn bending his mother, making her body frail, her fingertips bitten raw and her face feral. He didn’t want it to. If anything, they were mirror images, both wering pain the other inflicted. Any other time and he had been running, always on the chase of safety with her.

But he was Neil now. And dying as Neil was better than living as no one.

 

-Two Months Earlier-

 

“Welcome to Sweeties. My name is Neil and I will be your waiter for this evening. Can I offer you something to drink first?”

The girls in the booth giggled. One of them, pink hair in two ringlets at the top of her head and a choker around her neck, was waving Sweetie’s sugar packets over her friend’s snapping mouth. Like a shark out of water, the tall blonde was snapping her teeth over air, never quite getting the it until she finally bit her friend’s fingers.

Neil had seen people react worse to Sweetie’s special ‘cracker dust’.

“How about ice cream first, ladies? Today’s special is a chocolate peanutbutter supreme.”

“Ice-cream sounds great. Gr-eat.” While the pink-haired one spoke, waving her bitten hand. Her friend gulped down the cracker dust next to her. “An avalanche of ice-cream. All the ice-cream.”

“I will bring you our largest bowl. One for each?”

He took the giggle as affirmation. In the back of the store, Neil leaned over the counter in the kitchen. Neil pinned the order on the rack and twisted it for Johnny to see. The giant was pouring liquid into their ice-cream machine in the front, while their other cook, Lisa, was preparing meat on the stove. People rarely came to Sweeties for formidable dinners. Therefore, Neil would only find Johnny working here oftentimes. Johnny was always there, preparing ice cream and providing for more cracker dust.

He was an expert in baking and cooking, of any kind.

“Johnny, two extra choc-peanuts. Add some whip, they look like they’d crave some.”

The cook turned around, his frown smoothening out on his dark forehead. He seemed to like Neil, if this was any indication. He at least never told on him when Neil took a cigarette break and needed a bit longer on days on which every shadow seemed to haunt his heels and every gaze was a viewfinder. Sometimes, the cook would look at him and Neil’s legs would beg him to let them take him far away. But mostly, he ignored Neil like he did anyone else.

“Kay,” Johnny replied and turned back around to the pastry dough he was kneading. “You want to take a break til I’m done with the order?”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll check if more booths have filled up. Could use some more tips tonight.”

Neil stayed for a moment longer, watching as Johnny’s meaty hands gently started kneading pastry dough. He often liked to watch the cooks, trying to remember recipes so he could reproduce them for his mother. Maybe tonight, Neil could wait a little after his shift to see if he could take some leftovers to bring to her. There had to be something that she would eat.

When Neil could no longer stand half rotten food they’d found or the chemical taste of instant meals, his mother would force feed him. The memory of it made him swallow repeatedly and move his hands so he was reminded that they were free.

“You spoiled little brat will eat,” she’d scream, one hand pinching his nose shut, the other jamming a fork with cold fries into his mouth. He’d gag but finally swallow the bite while the fork cut into the back of his throat. “Food gives you energy to run. Not eating even for a day is like handing the hackbeil directly to your father. So you will eat, Alexander, or I will continue to make you. Whatever it is that we have right now, even if it is out of the garbage can, you will eat when I tell you to.”

Neil didn’t have the same power over his mother. He could only try and coerce her into eating by bringing home stuff from work. Mostly it went untouched by her and unmentioned by him.

She didn’t see the point in needing energy shackled to one place, she’s spit at him. They were already dead because Neil wanted to stay.

Neil took a new spoon and filled it with fresh ice cream as it emerged from the machine. It was too sweet in his mouth and he had trouble forcing it down. If his mother was right and they were already dead, he might as well go out with a stomach filled with ice cream. He finally swallowed, even if he felt the phantom sting of forks cutting his mouth open while he did it.

“You can have more, y’know?”

Neil shook his head at the cook and dropped the spoon into the sink. “Gotta get back to work.”

When he stepped out through the white swing doors, Neil nearly ran into his coworker bringing in empty platters. Antonio’s dark eyes threw daggers at him, which Neil easily caught and returned. Not everyone appreciated Neil’s unwillingness to share private details about himself or his refusal of going out for drinks and cracker dust after the shift was over. Antonio was a rat, ears always perked up while he was shoveling in the garbage for scraps of other people’s secrets. Neil could not risk that. If his mother knew, if his mother knew...

“Watch out, Josten. People here actually need to work, not just stand around.”

Antonio scoffed and hit Neil’s shoulder on the way in. This caused his hands to slip on the trays as Neil had been prepared and had squared his body against the attack. A rare smile settled onto his lips as he watched his co-worker fumble to keep his balance. Plates splintered on the graying tiles, accompanied by the sound of Spanish curses.

Neil looked right at Antonio, mockingly wearing a face of shock and pity, when he said, “Oh, Toni. The plates should actually go into the dishwasher, not on the floor. Be glad you have me to teach you things.”

“Fuck you!” Neil stood unmoved even when Antonio started shoving him. Even if his hands hammered into fresh bruises. Neil had masks, all modeled to perfection. “Better watch your fucking back, Josten!”

“Or what?” His hands shot out to grasp Antonio’s forearms. He may be his mother’s punching bag but he would not let this rat walk all over him. Rarely did he have the urge to take all his pain and inflict it on someone else, but the rat seemed to beg for it.

Before Neil could do anything, Johnny was pulling his co-worker back by his shirt. He was twice as broad as the both of them, a figure that was non-treatening when he used his hands to delicately shape dough but very imposing at that moment.

It reminded him of the elegant way his father would handle fine silverware at the dinner table but then turn and use those hands to hack off someone’s leg with a cleaver right after. Neil took an involuntary step back.

“Neil, check the booths,” Johnny said to him, forehead in a furrow.

Neil immediately followed. With the door swinging into his back outside the kitchen, he felt like he could breathe a little easier. He had just gone from meaning to punch someone to a spineless coward, but such was his life. His parents only knew him as the later. They had made sure to give him a bend back and lowered eyes, if for different reasons. His fahter so he could control him. Neil breathed, he was alive. His mother kept him alive.

The table tops in Neil’s side of the room were filled up with laughter, pulling into focus. It was a thankful job. He would serve people fun each day, however artificial it was. He filled up the sugar, salt and pepper containers, gave the girls their ice-cream and took on new orders until he felt like himself again. Napkins full of cracker dust were placed on the tables and when everything calmed down, Neil watched as people ripped open the packages and let the drug trickle down throats. He had never tried, even if the Rat and the Rat’s best friend Chloe had tried to push him into it. Neil was never allowed to slip. He saw the way the people’s muscles would loosen, heard the loud years from the other side of the restaurant. No masks.

After he served the last table of his shift, Neil dropped the apron under the kitchen sink and shook a cigarette out of the pocket of his jacket in the closet. Behind the public restrooms, a door led out to their backyard. The door was clearly labelled for “staff only,” so Neil was perplexed when he saw a boy walk through it into the restaurant just as he wanted to step out.

“Hey,” he said but the boy was past him too quickly to say more. Baffled, all Neil could do was to watch the retreating back of the figure. Short blonde hair on a body small enough to have Neil question the age and gender if it hadn’t been for broad shoulders and muscled arms. The scent of the stranger lingered in the hallway like a trail.

Smoke and sugar.

Neil turned around once the boy was no longer in sight and took the door out. The backyard was a concrete mass of gray on gray. In daylight, transporters would park in front and products would be taken up the ramps, obstructing him from being here when he needed to be alone. At night, he found himself alone here, like he was cut off from the rest of the world.

He leaned against the railing until he felt cold metal through his pressed white shirt. The wind had whipped away the smell of cigarettes but Neil counted two more buds on the floor than when he had last taken a break. So the stranger had smoked out here. A different brand than Neil’s, too.

Neil rarely was out here to smoke, but used cigarettes as his excuse nonetheless. It gave him time to gather his thoughts and let the winter chill ground him. His mother and him had spent some winters living in abandoned buildings and the cold had started to become a familiar friend to Neil. He pressed closer to the metal. No one’s eyes had lingered on him today, no one had made him stay to talk after they had ordered. Neil was safe. He did not endanger his mother more by staying here.

It was ironic, really, how his legs still begged him to run. Run from here, run to the edge of the world and jump off so his father would never be able to find them. Instead, Neil forced himself to stand still. His hands clamped around the railing tight so his legs would stay in place.

Their funds were running out, that was what he said to reason with his mother. They would move on once spring came. In truth, Neil felt like his legs wanted to but couldn’t run any longer. Not when they were so close that the stadium lights beckoned him. So close to Kevin Day, newest member of the Palmetto Foxes. A losing team gaining a champion. So close to a future Neil almost had had, had his mother not taken Exy from him and given him a life of hiding instead.

Just one season, he told himself. Just a short breather, where he could work two jobs , pretend he was Neil Josten, a boy who could have played Exy every day, then they’d move on. He’d be Phillip Carter next. His mother had already let their next documents be forged. Phillip Carter could be on the run again, Neil Josten was a person who stayed.

 

 

Neil came home from his second job at a gas station, to find himself at the end of a gun’s barrel. Neil closed the door behind himself, slowly, until he was sure no neighbor could spot them. What a picture they would make. Mother and son. Gun and coward.

She didn’t lower her hand even after her mind caught up to tell her she was safe. Neil could see it clearly in her eyes, the warning. Her warning to him.

“One day you’re getting us killed,” she hissed, then finally put the gun into the holster she had on her side. “I told you to knock before you use your damn key. Next time who knows if I’ll shoot first.”

“I’m sorry,” Neil said and meant it for so much more than that night.

His mother eyed him, wearing her own mask of anger, one she rarely switched out, then turned her back to him.

“I brought food. It’s hot dogs from the gas station and pastries from Sweeties.”

She didn’t reply, a punishment for his mistake that hurt less than her hands would. To his left was the living room and the kitchen and he was careful to step over the newspapers and documents strewn all over the floor and furniture. Neil couldn’t spot markings on the pages and let out a small sigh of relief. No word about his father then. No word about his coming release from prison.

There rarely was but it didn’t stop his mother from stealing newspapers and going through them each day. From letting the TV and radio run at the same time. Any clue of him and she’d force them to run. She had threatened to break his legs if necessary on multiple locations. Neil had no doubt that his mother would do what she had to to keep Neil safe. She had done it up to this point after all.

Neil put the food on the counter, right on top of an old issue of the New York Times. He heard her approach but didn’t turn to her. Knowing pain to come did not prepare for it. He flinched when he felt boney fingers cut into the bruises of his right upper arm.

“Did someone follow you here?”

He couldn’t look at her. He felt the sweat of his hands gather on the plastic handle of the bag as he held onto it. His hesitation made her grip even tighter.

“No one followed me here. I was careful! No one even looked at me at my jobs or talked to me, today.” He wouldn’t mention Antonio. The Rat was nobody to worry about. “I was careful, mum.”

“Are you lying?”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t dare lie to me just because you want to stay.”

“I’m not.”

She finally let go of his arm then. “Good. It’s just when you’re at work I don’t know what to do. I can’t protect you where I can’t see you.” Her hands were soft, as if that was all they could be when she turned his head to her. “Don’t make me regret staying for you. I will haunt you beyond your own grave if you die.”

He had no doubt she would. Looking at her now, he could almost see the mother who had secretly held him in her arms after one of his father’s many lessons. He could remember sharing a blanket when the winters outside were harsh enough to threaten their lives even without his father present. He would recall birthdays in which she would fold animals out of newspaper, filigree and elaborate, so that he wouldn’t dare touch them for days.

This woman, a house of skin barely held up by bones, had gentleness inside of her. With her hands soft on his skin, Neil tried to find how he could be scared of her, how a woman even smaller than he was, time and fear carved into her vividly, could mold him into the form she knew was necessary to make them survive. The form of a coward.

He leaned into her warmth while it was offered.

“I won’t let them find us, mum. I promise.” She nearly smiled.

At night, Neil woke up in sweat, a nightmare hammering in his chest and head. As soon as he did, even when he tried being still, his mother woke, too. They slept with their backs pressed to one another, one facing the door, the other facing the windows. It was safer that way. It was also the only way Neil could think of falling asleep. However, it meant that whenever one of them woke, the other would, too. And his mother always did with a knife in her hand. She didn’t say a word, he couldn’t even feel her breath against his back or on the mattress until she finally saw no threat.

“I’ll just grab myself a water,” Neil whispered into the night. “You need anything?”

His mother shook her head, eyes still wild in the yellow lamp light and knife held loosely on her lap. They never turned it off, or they wouldn’t be able to see someone standing over them in the dark.

Neil stood and walked to the kitchen that was right in the room, only divided by a counter. It was all the space they had in the apartment, this room off that wasn’t really a room off. More space meant more room to hide.

He let the water run over his wrists first, before he grabbed a glass and let it pour in. He saw the bag of food untouched while he sipped it, let it calm the heaving of his stomach. The nightmare was his shadow still, all edges sharp like his father’s cleavers. He wished in that moment that he could climb out and sit on their window sill. The only space his mother wouldn’t occupy.

But she had bolted the windows shut because they lead out to the fire escape. “If you can get out, people can get in,” she had said the night she caught him smoking on the stairs. He had learned his lesson with the press of a cigarette on his shoulder, next to where his father had seared a lesson into his flesh.

There was no way out, no way to run like this. He was almost grateful, because Neil Josten needed to stay. Before he went to lie down again, Neil stood to stare out of the window into the city. They were high up, harder to reach that way. He hoped they would only be two people in a large city, swallowed up by it, buried under snow, cold wind, and its bright lights.

Tomorrow, before his shift at Sweeties, he would pretend to work at the gas station but instead take a bus out to Palmetto State University. The crowds would give him cover while he could breathe in the dust of the stadion. Smell the sweat and plastic off the floor and be swept up by the enthusiasm of the fans until he felt like he was on the field himself.

He’d see Kevin Day. Almost in reach, Kevin Day, a threat wearing the uniform Neil dreamed himself in every night. If Kevin saw him, even under the disguise of dark dye and brown contact lenses, Neil would have to run. No one could forget what they had seen, what Neil’s father had made them watch together. If Kevin recognized him, oh how his mother would react.

Still, Neil had to be there, see him live his dream just to see that someone could. When he laid down once more, back to his mother’s back, he couldn’t fall asleep. He was too excited.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. I'd really appreciate comments from you :)


End file.
